Many web developers need to allow their users to access their website or application via both the www subdomain and the root (non-www) domain. That is, users should have the same experience when visiting www.my-website.com
and my-website.com
. While there are many ways to set this up, the most SEO-friendly solution is to choose which domain you prefer—the subdomain or the root domain—and have the web server redirect users who visit the other one to the preferred domain.
There are many kinds of HTTP redirects, but in this scenario, it’s best to use a 301 redirect, which tells clients, “The website you have requested has permanently moved to another URL. Go there instead.” Once the browser receives the HTTP 301 response code from the server, it sends a second request to the new URL given by the server and the user is presented with the website, probably never noticing they were redirected.
Why not configure your web server to just serve the same website for requests to both domain names? That may seem easier, but it does not confer the SEO advantages of the 301 redirect. A permanent redirect tells search engine crawlers that there is one canonical location for your website, and this improves the search rankings of that one URL.
In this tutorial, you will configure a 301 redirect using Nginx on Ubuntu 14.04. If you are running Apache instead of Nginx, see this tutorial instead: How To Redirect www to Non-www with Apache on Ubuntu 14.04 .
To complete this tutorial, you first need:
sudo
group) on the server that is running Nginx. If you don’t already have that set up, follow this tutorial: Initial Server Setup with Ubuntu 14.04.Let’s get started by configuring your DNS records.
First, you need to point both www.my-website.com
and my-website.com
to your server running Nginx. (The rest of the tutorial assumes your domain is my-website.com
. Replace that with your own domain wherever you see it below.) You will do this by creating a DNS A record for each name that points to your Nginx server’s IP address.
Open your DNS provider’s web console. This tutorial uses DigitalOcean DNS.
In the Add a domain form, enter your registered domain name in the text field and click Add Domain. This will bring up the new domain’s page, where you can view, add, and delete records for the domain.
Under Create new record, type “@” in the HOSTNAME text field. This is a special character that indicates you are adding a record for the root domain name, a record for just plain my-website.com
. In the WILL DIRECT TO text field, enter the public IPv4 address of your server, and click Create Record. (No need to change the TTL.)
For your second DNS record, you could use a CNAME record instead of an A record. A CNAME record is an alias that points to another name instead of an IP address. You could create a CNAME that directs www.my-website.com
to my-website.com
, and any HTTP request for the www subdomain would find its way to your server since you just created the A record for the root domain. But to keep things simple, just create another A record like the first one, entering “www” in the HOSTNAME field and the server’s public IP address in the WILL DIRECT TO field.
When you have created both records, it should look something like this:
With the two records in place, web requests for both my-website.com
and www.my-website.com
should reach your Nginx server. Now let’s configure the server.
As stated in the Prerequisites, you should already have your website configured in Nginx. It does not matter whether the site’s server
block appears in the main /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default
file or in its own file. The important thing is that you have some server
block configured with the server_name
directive set to my-website.com
and/or www.my-website.com
. Whether your server_name
contains one or both names, now is the time to decide which name you would like to be the one and only name to host the site.
Open the file that contains your website configuration (e.g., /etc/nginx/sites-available/my-website.com.conf
) in nano
or your favorite editor and find the server_name
directive:
- sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/my-website.com.conf
server {
. . .
server_name my-website.com www.my-website.com
. . .
}
If you want to redirect www.my-website.com
to my-website.com
, remove www.my-website.com
from the server_name
line, and save and exit the file. (If you want to redirect my-website.com
to www.my-website.com
, remove my-website.com
instead.)
Then, create a new Nginx configuration file called /etc/nginx/sites-available/www.my-website.com.conf
(or /etc/nginx/sites-available/my-website.com.conf
, if that is the name you are redirecting). Name the file whatever you like, but as with all Nginx configuration files, the file name must end in .conf
:
- sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/www.my-website.com.conf
Add the following server
block to the file, replacing my-website.com
with your own domain name:
server {
server_name www.my-website.com;
return 301 $scheme://my-website.com$request_uri;
}
If you are redirecting my-website.com
to the www subdomain instead, put my-website.com
only in the server_name
, and www.my-website.com
in the URL on the next line.
Save and exit when you are finished. Then make a symlink in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled
to this new file so Nginx will pick it up after restarting:
- sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/www.my-website.com.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
This configures Nginx to send a 301 redirect back to any clients requesting www.my-website.com
, and directs them to visit my-website.com
instead. The redirect preserves the request URI, so that a request to http://www.my-website.com/login.php
will be redirected to http://my-website.com/login.php
.
Note: The server
block above does not contain the listen
directive. This is OK, because as mentioned in this tutorial, any server
block without a listen
directive will listen on 0.0.0.0:80 (port 80 on all interfaces). But if your Nginx server is home to multiple IP addresses, or if your site listens on a port other than 80, you may need to add a listen
directive to spell out the specific IP address and port. Use the same value for listen
that your site’s main server
block uses.
Before applying the changes, check that your Nginx configuration is error free:
- sudo nginx -t
Unless you made a syntax error (e.g., you forgot a semicolon), the configuration should be OK.
Outputnginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok
nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful
Now restart Nginx to apply the new redirect rule:
- sudo service nginx restart
Before visiting www.my-website.com
in your browser, make a request using curl
on either your server or your local machine (if curl
is installed locally):
- curl -IL http://www.my-website.com
The -I
flag tells curl
to show only the headers from the server response. The -L
flag tells curl
to obey any redirects from the server by automatically making a second request, this time to the URL given in the Location
header (just as a web browser would do). Since you have configured the 301 redirect, curl
should make two requests, and you should see just the headers of the two responses:
OutputHTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: nginx/1.20.1
Date: Thu, 08 Dec 2022 19:24:44 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 169
Connection: keep-alive
Location: http://my-website.com
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.20.1
Date: Thu, 08 Dec 2022 19:24:44 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 57
Last-Modified: Thu, 01 Dec 2022 22:10:57 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
ETag: "63892671-39"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
In the 301 (Moved Permanently) response to the original request to http://www.my-website.com
, notice the last header: Location: http://my-website.com
. The second response is from curl
’s followup request to http://my-website.com
, and if your website is healthy, the server should have responded with 200 (OK).
Finally, visit http://www.my-website.com
in your web browser. Blink, and you’ll miss the redirect. Your website should appear as usual, but look again in your address bar and notice that the “www” is missing from the URL. Most users will never notice this, and so they will have the same experience as if they had requested http://my-website.com
.
In this tutorial, you added two DNS records for your website and configured Nginx to redirect a secondary domain to your preferred domain. Now your website is reachable via both domains. Maybe it already was before you read this tutorial; perhaps you were serving it directly from both domain names. But with just four more lines of Nginx configuration, you have improved your website’s standing in the eyes of the search engines—and thereby exposed it to more users across the internet.
Want some further reading on how Nginx decides which server
block will handle a given request? Check out this guide: Understanding Nginx Server and Location Block Selection Algorithms.
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You should use:
Otherwise you will get
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
for the www and non-www versions.Using the code above you’ll get
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
for the non-www domain. See: http://wiki.nginx.org/Pitfalls#Server_NameHow do I go it on config with SSL ? Should I create 3 server blocks ?
Every form of www to non-www redirects works fine except
https://www.example.com
. When I runcurl -I https://www.example.com
I getHTTP/1.1 302 Found
and no redirects!This is really helpful!
Great tutorial!
But doesn’t a simple
do the trick?
It didn’t work for me. I researched and fixed with this way. Open /etc/nginx/sites-available/example . And edit the file like that:
I use like:
Hello, i`m very new to this, could you please tell me how to save after putting:
Thank you
Thanks, it is now working properly for my site.
Hmm, it didn’t work for me. I arrive to the “Welcome to nginx” page when browsing to “myotherdomain.com”